Recently I wrote an article on how to find love on Plenty of Fish to help you make the most of your online dating membership.
Since that time, Plenty of Fish has made plenty of changes. The goal is to get rid of those looking for casual sex and hookups and focus on those looking for a serious relationship.
Plenty of Fish founder Markus Frind sent an email to all subscribers stating the following:
“When I created POF, I wanted it to be all about finding relationships with the right person,” he said. “For the first seven years, this worked really well. I got the site to 10 million users without any employees and POF was generating a ton of relationships.”
“Around three years ago, everyone started using the website via mobile phones. Today, about 70 percent of POF use is via a mobile phone. Unfortunately, about 2 percent of men started to use POF as more of a hookup site, mostly due the casual nature of cell phone use,” he continued. “In sticking with my vision that POF is all about relationships, I’m going to make a bunch of changes to ensure it stays a relationship-focused site.”
With the recent announcement that one-third of marriages are a result of couples meeting online, I believe POF’s decision to say goodbye to those looking to hook up is a wise one.
Here are the changes in a nutshell:
- Any first contact between users that contains sexual references will not be sent. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will be deleted without warning. This rule has actually been in effect since last month and it’s made the site so much better.
- You can only contact people +/- 14 years of your age. There is no reason for a 50-year-old man to contact an 18-year-old woman. The majority of messages sent outside those age ranges are all about hookups. Anyone who tries to get around this rule will get deleted.
- Intimate Encounters will go away in the next few months.
There are 3.3 million people who use the site every day. Of those 3.3 million, there are only 6,041 single women looking for Intimate Encounters. Of those 6,041 women, the ones with hot pictures are mostly men pretending to be women.
Intimate Encounters on POF can be summed up as a bunch of horny men talking to a bunch of horny men pretending to be women.
“POF’s decision to say goodbye to those
looking to hook up is a wise one.”
Frind ended his note by saying, “In short, the vast majority of people will not be impacted. This is because the vast majority of people are not going around spamming women saying, ‘Let’s have sex tonight.’ I can’t change POF alone. I need your help to get the word out there that POF is all about relationships!”
In addition to this, at the top of every email that is received on POF, recipients have the option to report “Click to Flag if Message Has Nude Images.”
While a free site as popular as Plenty of Fish, which ranks number one by Experian/Hitwise for the most visitors in the U.S., attracts a variety of relationship types, Frind has put his digital foot down.
It’s back to basics for singles looking for love online.
Date feedback.
A great feature on POF is the ability for members to provide date feedback online.
Did your date have bad breath? Did he or she arrive late? Did you connect and have chemistry? How closely did your date resemble his/her profile?
Plenty of Fish is collecting data and those who have signed up for a premium membership to the site can actually receive real feedback with the goal of improving their dating lives.
It’s simple to use and each email you receive has a link on the right that will take you to their Date Feedback page.
Are you a member of POF? Did you find it to be a site for casual encounters or serious relationships?
